VILLARS-SUR-OLLON, Switzerland (AP) \u2014 Tadej Pogacar warmed up for next month’s Tour de France with a dominant victory in the Tour de Suisse on Sunday, and the cycling star did so in flamboyant style by winning the fifth and final stage.<\/p>\n
The 27-year-old Slovenian is in ominous form heading into the July 4-26 Tour, where he’ll try to win the showcase race for the fifth time.<\/p>\n
Pogacar won the opening stage of the Tour de Suisse, secured a 1-second victory over rival Mathieu van der Poel in the time trial on Saturday and won stage 5 on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Pogacar caught Frenchman Lenny Martinez about 800 meters near the end of the final climb of the 151.1-kilometer (94-mile) trek to Villars-sur-Ollon.<\/p>\n
“It was a super hard day,\u201d Pogacar said. \u201cThe parcours (route) was really tough, and with the team we did a super good job.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the overall standings, Pogacar finished 6 minutes, 32 seconds ahead of Ecuadorian Richard Carapaz and 6:53 clear of Czech rider Mathias Vacek.<\/p>\n
Pogacar secured a dominant win at the six-day Tour de Romandie last month, after strong performances in the one-day classics. In April, he clinched a third straight victory at Li\u00e8ge\u2013Bastogne\u2013Li\u00e8ge.<\/p>\n
Poga\u010dar also won Milan-San Remo and the Tour of Flanders \u2014 winning that race for a third time \u2014 and was narrowly beaten at Paris-Roubaix by Wout van Aert.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"VILLARS-SUR-OLLON, Switzerland (AP) \u2014 Tadej Pogacar warmed up for next month’s Tour de France with a dominant victory…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":751466,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[569],"tags":[64,63,784,21527,49603,77973,146002,360644,145996,63569,85,6494],"class_list":["post-751465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-cycling","tag-lenny-martinez","tag-mathias-vacek","tag-mathieu-van-der-poel","tag-package-100502-member-choice-sports-option","tag-pogacar-tour-suisse-france","tag-product-30599-ap-sports-news-s-wire-only","tag-richard-carapaz","tag-sports","tag-tadej-pogacar"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/751465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=751465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/751465\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/751466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=751465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=751465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=751465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}